What’s happening with SECR?

The government’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting Scheme (SECR) has been running since 2019. What can we expect to happen with it in the next year or so?

Businesses in scope of SECR will by now be used to having this compliance obligation on their to-do list. But the future direction of the scheme – or whatever replaces it – will probably be towards more stringent reporting requirements. 

SECR launched on 1 April 2019 and the government set itself a mandatory target to review the scheme after five years. So the planned Post-Implementation Review, to judge the success of the scheme and recommend future changes, was due by 1 April 2024. The government missed its own deadline. This suggests that SECR slipped off the agenda for a time while the focus was on other regulatory matters – but these other matters still affect the future of SECR. 

Scope 3 consultation

In October 2023 the government launched Call for Evidence on Scope 3 Emissions in the UK Reporting Landscape. This was an acknowledgement of the need to scale up action on Scope 3 emissions, those in a company’s value chain.

For businesses in most sectors, Scope 3 makes up the lion’s share of emissions, but it’s also the hardest to abate.  Because Scope 3 is such a complex challenge to tackle, many businesses focus their efforts on Scopes 1 and 2: direct emissions and those from purchased energy. But for the UK to meet its net zero target, that focus needs to shift. (We have described Scope 3 emissions as “the underwater part of an iceberg: hard to see, but impossible to ignore”.)

At the moment, SECR doesn’t make it mandatory to report most Scope 3 emissions. Large unquoted companies and limited liability partnerships (LLPs) have to disclose some Scope 3 emissions, like business travel in rental cars, but not others. For example, under the current SECR rules there’s no need to report the emissions from the lorry firm you use for transporting goods or the firm you use for waste disposal.

Quoted companies don’t have to report on any Scope 3 emissions at all, although it is ‘strongly encouraged’ in the official guidance. 

The 2023 Call for Evidence on Scope 3 wasn’t just about SECR, but it was an opportunity to gather information about SECR that could be used in the future review. So it asked questions about SECR, such as:

• Should Scope 3 reporting requirements under SECR be the same for all types of business, rather than differentiating between quoted companies and large companies or large LLPs?
• Some organisations are going beyond the bare minimum with their SECR reporting and voluntarily producing Scope 3 data – what are the costs and benefits of this to the business?
• Are the SECR regulations achieving their original objectives?
• Have there been any unintended negative consequences to SECR?
• Is SECR aimed at the right types of business?

The Call for Evidence closed in December 2023 and a summary of responses was published in May 2024.

The ISSB is behind all this

The motivation behind the Scope 3 Call for Evidence wasn’t the statutory requirement to evaluate SECR. It was the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), which had just published its standards on sustainability-related disclosures for companies. These are known as the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 1 and 2. They exist to help companies communicate the sustainability-related risks and opportunities for the business, for the benefit of potential investors.

Once the ISSB published IFRS 1 and IFRS 2, the government began working on ways to align the UK with these international standards. So the Call for Evidence was part of a project to see how the ISSB standards fit in with the regulations and plans we already had in 2023 – not just SECR but things like the emerging Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which the government announced in December of that year.

But the biggest task arising from the publication of the ISSB standards is the job of transposing them into UK law as the UK Sustainability Reporting Standards (UK SRS). This is important for our attractiveness to international investors and the UK is just one of many jurisdictions working on adopting the ISSB standards.

UK SRS timeline

What does the SRS have to do with SECR?

The UK SRS won’t be a new scheme for business to comply with. It will be a set of standards that all existing and future schemes have to align with. This could mean changes to SECR in the future as requirement become more stringent. Or it could mean that SECR gets scrapped and replaced with something different.

The current state of play

In September 2025 we asked the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero what’s going on with SECR. A spokesperson told the Energy Advice Hub that an in-depth evaluation of SECR was commissioned in January 2025. He said: “The findings of this will feed into the statutory Post-Implementation Review that will be published in due course.”

Meanwhile, the official SECR guidance hasn’t changed since the scheme launched in 2019. That was before the UK government made its legally binding net zero commitment. So we know that any future incarnations of SECR would have stricter standards even if the UK SRS wasn’t a factor, because any compliance scheme created or modified after the net zero target needs to align with it.

We don’t think it’s likely that there will be any changes to the SECR rules until after the UK SRS come into force. We see two broad possibilities:

• A new version of SECR that meets the UK SRS standards, which means more thorough and accurate reporting for UK businesses in scope; or
• The end of SECR, to be replaced by something else that also aligns with the UK SRS.

For the rest of 2025, we confidently expect no changes to the SECR scheme. If you’d like support or advice with upcoming carbon compliance requirements, get in touch with Sustainable Energy First. As ever, keep an eye on the Energy Advice Hub for updates.